Google’s recent EMD Update and Why It Could Blow Your Career Site Right Off Page One of the SERPs!

On September 27, 2012, Google® announced yet another change to their search engine algorithm. And this time, the change could have far reaching implications for career site SEO.

Here’s why.

Companies usually don’t invest the time and money it takes to build search engine optimization (SEO) into their career site and job postings. They typically put up a few career-related pages and don’t build in a keyword, content or tagging strategy. Plus, the job postings and candidate application process is usually contracted out to an applicant tracking system (ATS).

Now a bit about Google’s recent EMD (exact match domain) update…

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam fighting team, announced in a September 28 tweet that “an upcoming Google algo change” (the EMD update) would, “reduce low-quality, ‘exact-match’ domains in search results.” That means websites with keyword-rich domains (e.g., mycompanyjobs.com or jobs.mycompany.com) will no longer be ranked higher in search results based on keywords embedded in their domain names.

In the past, if you chose a keyword-rich domain name, like mycompanyjobs.com or CheapShoesCareers.com, you didn’t have to do a lot of career site SEO to ensure a high search results ranking. You could “coast along” on the power of your company name and keywords alone. Well, that isn’t necessarily the case any longer. With Google’s new EMD update, the power of keywords in domains will be devalued and search result rankings will rely much more heavily on the strength of keyword-focused, high-quality content within the website.

What can you do to fix this problem?

One of two things… You can spend more money on advertising and hope it reaches and influences the right audience and drives potential candidates to your career site and job postings.
OR
You can develop an SEO strategy that pays attention to keywords, content and tagging. It will require some time, a small effort on your part and a little money, but the payoff in “free” traffic from Google will be huge.